Subsidy plans from both the DPP and the KMT-TPP alliance preserve the system producing demographic collapse while avoiding harder questions about marriage, men, motherhood and modern life
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By Michael Turton / Contributing reporter
This column has often observed that the purpose of government subsidy programs is to preserve the system that is causing the problem while still giving the appearance of doing something. In no area of public policy is this more obvious than in the birth rate collapse.
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the legislature’s two pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), were deadlocked over a subsidy program for children. The DPP’s proposal, a component of the 18-point plan to boost birth rates President William Lai (賴清德) announced last month, offers NT$5,000 a month per child to parents until age 6, after which half will be transferred to a government-managed account with a guaranteed interest rate, which the child can access at the age of 18.
The KMT-TPP alliance is offering “Taiwan Future Accounts,” government-run accounts for children under the age of12, seeded with NT$50,000 and increased by NT$10,000 each year. Parents could add up to NT$100,000 with tax breaks, and the account also goes to the child at 18. No doubt a proposal by which parents could give money to children at low tax rates will be welcomed by the KMT’s wealthy supporters.
Photo courtesy of the New Taipei City High Riverbank Office
Neither set of policies addresses the problems that are driving the demographic collapse, from urban densification and boss culture to falling marriage rates, rising age of marriage, rejection of out-of-wedlock children, lack of male participation in housework, a brutal educational system with high parental involvement and the lack of a birthrate-oriented immigration and asylum policy. Lai’s 18-point plan touches on some of the problems, but nowhere does it forthrightly attack them.
Further, subsidies do not have powerful effects. As a review of numerous studies on government policies to promote fertility by Anne Gauthier and Stuart Gietel-Basten last year observed, “most studies suggest that the impact of cash benefits on fertility tends to be small (if any).”
WOMEN AND MARRIAGE
Photo courtesy of the Keelung City Government
Nowhere in any of the plans of either major party are imaginative social policies aimed at issues such as changing the way people think about marriage or the way Taiwan’s men view housework. Yet either would be a major benefit for birth rates.
“Women’s views have liberalized significantly over the last 20 years,” observes a recent paper by Ella Rossetti out of Lehigh University that discusses Taiwan, “but those of men lag.”
To change society’s view of marriage, Rossetti recommends that the government promote programming that supports more liberal views of family, including acceptance of single-motherhood. The authorities should also focus on changing men’s views of family life.
Photo courtesy of Taichung Tourism and Travel
“One way to promote this reframing could be through the development of grants rewarding women who make social media content about what it is like to be a working mom,” Rossetti says.
An important factor in the woman’s decision to have children is her expectation of support from the man. More than 60 percent of mothers do not trust their male spouses’ parenting capabilities, according to a Child Welfare League Foundation survey of nearly 800 mothers published last month. The mothers said they found the “lack of time to rest” their greatest challenge, followed by “difficulty balancing family and other life roles,” and “concern over household finances.”
This is well known among advocates. Childcare Policy Alliance spokesman Wang Chao-ching (王兆慶) suggested last year that policies should promote a “dual track” system of care in which men take on much greater responsibility in child-rearing.
A 2022 paper by Jac Thomas and Francisco Rowe explores the effect of male participation in housework on fertility in Taiwan. It’s one of several studies showing that the more equal the division of labor in the household, the higher the probability that the couple will have a child. Their results show that “the odds of a couple with an equal balance of housework having a birth is roughly 4 times as high as the odds of a couple with the mean [low male participation] balance of housework having a birth.”
It seems intuitively obvious that a media and social media campaign to get men to participate more at home would have strong effects on the birth rate. Good luck getting the largely male-dominated political world to commit to anything like that, though.
FERTILITY RATE
Mongolia’s total fertility rate (TFR) last year was 2.58, projected to be slightly lower this year. That figure is still more than twice that of the bordering provinces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). How does Mongolia do that? One factor is that the government reinforces the status of motherhood. Mothers who have four or more children receive an award from the hand of the President himself, the Order of Glorious Motherhood, Second Class — First Class if the mother has six or more children. There is a monetary award, but it is insignificant.
Of course, Mongolia is a rural society with a small population that has long held motherhood in esteem. In a sense, the policy of giving medals to mothers simply formalizes that. Taiwan’s society, by contrast, is typical of the modern world, where “the status competitions of modern life, like education and career, directly compete with family life” as the social media commentator Daniel Hess observed on his More Births Substack. In subcultures where motherhood has high status, often tiny religious groups such as the Amish, birth rates remain higher than society at large.
Yet raising the social status of mothers is an idea that could be modified for application in Taiwan. One obvious way to do it would be to pay mothers large sums in the form of extremely public awards to have babies, to offset the reductions in future earnings and retirement that babies cause for mothers, and convey status on them.
It is often argued that an obvious answer to this is immigration. Immigration may raise the overall population, but its effects on overall fertility are mixed. Though immigrants often have higher birth rates than the native born, immigration can reduce overall fertility by driving down fertility among native born. According to some scholars, one vector of that effect is that immigration may increase housing costs. Clearly immigration policies would have to address such issues.
Gauthier and Gietel-Basten observe that “around the low fertility world, the narrative is shifting more towards supporting couples to have the number of children they wish for (which is almost always a more relevant number than the TFR)”. They warn, however, that supporting that kind of policy environment requires robust social survey work to support and understand the effects of government policies on birth behavior.
Scholars have observed a critical issue of modern birth rate policies is that they are only implemented when the population is already in decline and the crisis is obvious. Hence, population effects are to a certain extent already locked in — societies already have fewer women of childbearing age, and they are having fewer children per woman, a vicious cycle that is hard to break, and one that subsidies will not address at all.
Notes from Central Taiwan is a column written by long-term resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary informed by three decades of living in and writing about his adoptive country. The views expressed here are his own.
